Category Archives: environment

It’s one week to the EU Referendum, and the good news is that both In and Out camps have been incredibly evil in their campaigning. Today we continue our exploration of the amazing lies and deceits that both sides have been telling, looking at Sovereignty and the Environment.

Back in May 2015, the government started it’s war on green energy. The story that it came up with to cover for this ideological assault on the planet was that green energy subsidies were costing the average household a fortune. That fortune turned out to be about 0.7% of your bill – about £8 on average (far less than the subsidy on coal and gas). However, who wouldn’t want to save £8, even if it meant accelerating climate change, right?

Well, a parliamentary report published today says it may not have been such a good idea. In fact the report claims the government’s culling of green energy will cost us £3.18bn a year, or £116 per household on average.

The government has taken a number of steps to kill off green energy (despite it being cheaper than nuclear), and those steps are seen as so irrational by investors that no energy investors trust the Conservatives any more. As a result it is harder to find funding for new power schemes, pushing prices up.

Examples cited by the report are;

Highly successful carbon capture schemes were abandoned just weeks before the end of the 10 year £220m project

As the recent floods have shown, you don’t have to have a house on a floodplain to be flooded, but it helps an awful lot. Because people tend to be averse to losing valued possessions and living in a B&B for months, the Environment Agency advises people not to build on floodplains. However, floodplains are generally cheap to buy, and because they are flat they are cheap to build on, so provide nice cheap housing for the masses (even if those masses will get wet on a regular basis).

Now the government has come out in direct contradiction to the Environment Agency, and said it is fine to build on floodplains, as long as the people who live there are told about the risk. As a result about half of all flagship “affordable” homes are planned to be built on floodplains. When the only houses people can buy are on a floodplain, warning them that they are going to flood and pretending that’s good enough is pure evil. It’s a bit like telling someone that there’s a real risk to health from asbestos, and by the way the only job available is in the asbestos crushing factory.

The government claims to be doing something about this – it will launch an insurance scheme later this year, called FloodRe which will insure older flood risk properties at a low price. But while this scheme is great for those with a riverside mansion, it excludes leasehold flats and homes that are let, as well as all of the new “affordable” homes. Not ideal for the poor then. Mwhahaha.

Like most other measures that aren’t actually flood prevention, the scheme simply amounts to a taxpayer funded subsidy to house builders. In fact a recent report calculated that we are all subsidising builders by two to six percent, simply to have them build homes that will be regularly flooded. Which possibly isn’t what everyone wants.

After the astonishing amount of flooding, mainly in the North of England this year, people in the north are starting to accuse the government of having a bias against the North. And their reasoning? The government wouldn’t let this happen in the south. What naive fools.

In Paris last week, world leaders from 195 countries signed an historic agreement to limit global temperature changes to 1.5 degrees. That’s necessary to avoid London being flooded by the end of the century, so it’s probably for the best that they did that. However, despite signing the agreement the UK government has been cancelling any project which would help us to meet those targets. Mwhahaha.

To meet this target, UN scientists say that we must all be a net neutral emissions producer by 2070. The UK emissions have been declining in recent years (in large part due to the move away from burning coal), but nowhere near quickly enough to become carbon neutral by 2070. There were ambitious plans to move us in the right direction though – converting to renewable energy, carbon capture when we burn fossil fuels, and improving housing efficiency. All of those schemes were cancelled in the past year by Energy Secretary Amber Rudd. She has stopped solar panels from being erected, blocked onshore wind farms, cancelled a carbon capture project just as it was about to be completed, increased taxes on electric cars while cutting taxes on the most polluting cars, campaigned to relax the laws on car emissions, and cancelled a scheme which helps people insulate their homes. Instead she has subsidized the heavily polluting burning of shale gas, and on Friday, the same day as the Paris deal was signed, the government signed a deal to subsidise a number of new Diesel, Gas and even Coal powered stations.

Rather than attempting to defend this evil policy, Amber Rudd simply parrots that she is bringing energy prices down for consumers. Yes, she’s saving us a pound or two, but at the cost of a planet to live on. Her defence is that she wants companies to invest in new technology to provide cleaner energy for a cheaper price. The UK was previously a world leader in renewable energy engineering and design, but companies have shut down or are cancelling projects in the wake of the policy change in the UK. The government’s evil energy policy is doing little more than increasing pollution while killing jobs and innovation.